1988 Architectural Educator Fellowship
Alex Krieger

With the exception of several semester-length visiting professorships, all of my ten years of teaching has been at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Over the past six years as a full-time member of the faculty I have taught both design studios and lecture courses dealing with contemporary urbanism and the evolution of the American city. Several of these studios—including the one that I am teaching now, and the one from which I have selected examples of work—have been joint studios involving students from the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design departments. I strongly believe in the studio as a place for collaboration among the design disciplines, particularly when speculating upon the nature of contemporary urbanism.

Under the auspices of an SOM Foundation Fellowship I would advance a long-standing objective to prepare material for a book on the evolution of the American city. The manifestations of form and attitudes toward urban life that are characteristic of the American city have been the focus of my research and much of my teaching. I now need a concentrated period of time to augment and synthesize the material that I have been gathering. A sabbatical and the support of the SOM Foundation Fellowship would provide such an opportunity. The following describes my interest in the American city and is, therefore, a kind of point of departure.

Observing European society at the dawn of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler was convinced that all great cultures were city-born. Across the ocean, there has always been less certainty, about where great cultures are best nurtured and in what kinds of cities they flourish. As if responding to Spengler, Louis Sullivan wrote, “The great minds may go to the great cities, but they are not born and bred in the great cities . . . for the formation of a great mind solitude is prerequisite.” By contrast, Americans such as Henry James have been troubled by having the “instincts” but not the “forms of a high old civilization,” forms most readily found within venerable old cities. Others find much evidence of the physical concentration indicative of cities, but little corresponding commitment, “a mountain range of evidence without manifesto” Rem Koolhaas has suggested of Manhattan. Still others have struggled with a question prompted by Spengler’s assertion: contemplating the nature of their cities while remaining intrigued by those of their ancestors, Americans have wondered whether all great cultures produce their own forms of cities, and if so, what should these be for their culture?

Emerson alluded to one possibility with his wish for “rural strength and religion” along with “city facility and polish.” The success—and failures—of our boundless metropolitan “suburban” landscapes attest to the seriousness and longevity of this desire for a new kind of habitation in places imagined to forever remain between the extremes of artificial sophistication (found in cities) and of innocence or virtuousness (maintained amidst arcadian surrounding). The consequences of this search for a middle state prompts contemporary observers such as Irving Kristol to label ours and “urban civilization without cities,” a rather frightening yet hauntingly accurate description of many of our city’s rapidly expanding peripheries.

It seems to me that ignoring the “cityscapes” of Las Colinas, or Tyson’s Corner, or the Houston outside of its perimeter beltway, while placing great faith in the occasional evidence of gentrification within the older sections of several mostly eastern seaboard cities, is unlikely to bring our profession any great insights about contemporary urbanism. It is to such “cityscapes” that I would like to turn my research under the auspices of an SOM Foundation Fellowship. In addition to providing time and support for organizing and editing the material which I have been gathering for the past five years, the fellowship would enable me to travel to and to spend a period of time in such “cityscapes,” and use these trips as springboards to investigate certain paradigms regarding the modern American city.

Possibilities—and paradigms—would be:

1. “Reinvention” as a Condition of Civic Value: Once a flagship of American industry, more recently the butt of much civic satire, Cleveland is currently a city between epochs. Like its westerly neighbor Detroit, but unlike its easterly neighbor Pittsburgh, it has yet to reinterpret its purposes, prospects, or its image. What are the conditions, which have kept some cities, like Cleveland, from enjoying the “Renaissance-of-sorts” enjoyed by other former industrial cities, which have managed to find new purposes for continuing their evolution? Is the only key variable economics, or can civic design be an instrument of reinterpretation and revival?
2. Uncentered Urbanity: At mid-century, its boundlessness and lack of center, and its web of infrastructure importing water and exporting mobility made Los Angeles a symbol of advanced modernity among cities. At half-century earlier, an embryonic core of skyscrapers, a felicitous ring of suburbs, an extensive metropolitan park and boulevard system, and a role as a processing and serviced (rather than a production) center, made many posit Chicago as among the first great modern cities. As we approach the end of the century (an ignore the current oil industry crisis) it is Houston’s honor—or burden—to be heralded an archetypical contemporary city. Yet here development has always reigned over planning, with privatization afflicting traditionally public realms. Here there seem to be directly competing “centers.” What are the components of Houston’s modernity, and are these paradigmatic of simply problematic?
3. The Ideal and the Middle State: American planners—and many architects—have long advocated decentralization. The last tide of planned decentralization occurred under the aegis of the 1960s Federal New Town Program. New communities such as Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia were posited as alternatives, on the one hand, to overgrown older cities, and on the other hand, to homogeneous and characterless suburban regions. Beginning its third decade, Columbia is rapidly expanding, somewhat densifying, economically successful and much desired as a place to live. Is it a new species of city? Or is it still a suburb—albeit, a well-managed one—of Baltimore or Washington? While conceived as a means of “urbanizing” suburban patterns, many consider its influence to be the opposite, of serving as a model for “suburbanizing” the centers of the cities in order for these to be able to compete with the perceived advantages of places like Columbia. Finally, while under very strict development guidelines, how does the overall character of the place compare to areas like Tyson’s Corner in northern Virginia, the apparent archetypical expression of booming and nearly uncontrolled suburban sprawl?
4. The City of Permanent Transience: Flying over Las Colinas, at the “center between Dallas and Forth Worth” (as its promotional brochures brag), reveals an arcadian Ichnographia worthy of the suburban Piranesi. Las Colinas has no observable boundaries. It seems to be about competing interests and selected points of intensity. While the product of the best that current land planning has to offer, it seems unplanned. Its points of statis seem barely to rest on its “lawned” earth. Like Piranesi’s imagined Rome, it just may be an amplification of values intrinsic to its culture. How wrong Engels was about the nineteenth century London, for it is here in Las Colinas, not London, and perhaps second only to Piranesi’s Rome, that “indeed human society has been split into its component atoms.” At Las Colinas, boundless and centerless, the two-hundred-year-old desire for a middle landscapes and of a longing for place, stasis, and center are not even understood as contradictory. Does the idea of the city as a collection of semi-autonomous fragments preclude singular unifying organizational or formal patterns?
5. The Omnipresent City: It is difficult to accept society as being ubiquitously urban; here and everywhere, as Frank Lloyd Wright said of his not so imaginary Broadacres. He may have been dreaming of an omnipresent (if technologically sophisticated) countryside. The city’s revenge upon Wright was to make itself ubiquitous. “Urbaneness” seems simply no longer contingent upon location or physical proximity. I intend to travel within places that within most conventional definitions for the city would simply not qualify as being cities, and certainly no longer qualify as countryside, yet offer many choices, opportunities, and characteristics historically associated with urban life. I believe that such places are very much in need of our attention and contemplation. Certainly this seems true for me. Otherwise I can hardly presume to be able to teach about the contemporary American city.

Impact of the Award

August 13, 2021

As I reread my 1988 proposal today, midway through 2021, I am amazed how much of my career proceeded from that bit of chutzpa written nearly half-a-lifetime ago. It took quite a while for the book, then promised, to reach publication. But multiple “drafts,” involving courses and design studios, symposia and seminars, professional assignments, travel, and several prior books, were all instrumental in making good on the promise made in the proposal: “Under the auspices of the SOM Foundation Fellowship I would advance a long-standing objective to prepare material for a book on the evolution of the American city.”

Now, something perhaps I shouldn’t admit; I used a portion of the award to partially subsidize the then barely-budding practice of Chan Krieger, in partnership with my GSD classmate Lawrence A. Chan. A career combining practice and teaching, almost in equal measure ensued. Though at times requiring more stamina than likely helpful to one’s health, I would recommend embarking on such a dual career to many.

I thought then that among the objectives in the creation of the SOM Foundation must have been to further advance how the realms of professional practice and the education of future practitioners might interact. On the one hand, bringing the aspirational and speculative aspects so critical to the studio experience back to the office, where the pragmatics of client needs and budgets tend to govern. While at the same time, enabling the academy to better appreciate the efforts and the delight involved in carrying a design concept to physical realization. Regularly seeking out overlaps between practice and teaching surely improved both my teaching and practice, and my writing, I believe, too.

I would once more like to sincerely thank the SOM Foundation for enabling me to pursue youthful ambitions across by now a lengthy and rewarding career.

More on this Project

Krieger, Alex. “The American City Prior and (Possibly) Following the Pandemic.“ 50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, September 24, 2020.

Publication

Krieger, Alex. City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars.

The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment.

The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas.

Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.